Editorial

[p003] EDITORIAL T is ten years since the workers of Hungary were bloodily supressed by the armies of the Stalinist bureaucracy after briefly establishing the power of workers’ councils in the towns of Hungary in October 1956. The workers of Poland had, by their mass actions organised by similar councils, forced the removal of the ruling group within the Stalinist bureaucracy in their country. In those struggles, the workers of Eastern Europe fought to defend the economic gains of the expropriation of the capitalist class, and fought that they could do this only by armed struggle against the Stalinist bureau- cracy. This Stalinist bureaucracy had usurped the conquests of the Russian proletariat, first established in the Bolshevik- led revolution of October 1917. The struggle of the workers’ councils in Eastern Europe is characterised by the Stalinists as ‘counter-revolution’ and the work of imperialism. It was in fact the only revolutionary path for those workers. _ In order to take their place beside the inter- national working class in the struggle to defeat imperialism, they were and are forced to take the step of political revolution against their bureaucratic rulers. These bureaucrats, part of the international apparatus of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Kremlin, play the counter-revolutionary role of accommodating to the imperialists and separating the work- ers of Russia and Eastern Europe from the class struggle against imperialism in the rest of the world. This accommodation to imperialism is in fact a growing and enormous danger to the conquests of the October Revolution and its extension by military-bureaucratic means into Eastern Europe after World War I!. When the Hungarian and Polish workers today con- tinue their struggle against the bureaucracy, they are the best detenders of these gains, just as they were in 1956. The workers’ councils of 1956 were thus part of the very same struggle as that of the Vietnamese workers and peasants today, as that of workers in the advanced capitalist countries against their own ruling classes as the most effective blow they can strike against the imperialist butchery in Vietnam. The international class struggie is one; the programme of the Fourth International is the revolutionary basis for effectively uniting all these struggles under Marxist leadership for the defeat of world capitalism. This is why only the Fourth International, through the International Committee, can mobilise at the same time the most effective forces against the imperialist war in Vietnam and for the defence of the Hungarian and Polish Octobers. This unified programme was dramatically expressed in the demonstration at Liége, Belgium on October 15th, 1966. There the revolutionary youth of the British Young Socialists and French youth paper ‘Révoltes’ participated in an international youth demon- stration against the imperialist. war in Vietnam and against the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Their participation was based on the essential nature of a struggle against the bourgeoisie in their own coun- tries as the key to a struggle against imperialist war. There is no peace without new revolutions, as Lenin said. But the preparation for such struggles for power requires in our epoch an implacable fight against the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy. For this reason the Trotskyist youth of Britain and France carried the banner, ‘Long Live the Hungarian Revolution

[p004] 161 EDITORIAL T is ten years since the workers of Hungary were bloodily supressed by the armies of the Stalinist bureaucracy after briefly establishing the power of workers’ councils in the towns of Hungary in October 1956. The workers of Poland had, by their mass actions organised by similar councils, forced the removal of the ruling group within the Stalinist bureaucracy in their country. In those struggles, the workers of Eastern Europe fought to defend the economic gains of the expropriation of the capitalist class, and fought that they could do this only by armed struggle against the Stalinist bureau- cracy. This Stalinist bureaucracy had usurped the conquests of the Russian proletariat, first established in the Bolshevik- led revolution of October 1917. The struggle of the workers’ councils in Eastern Europe is characterised by the Stalinists as ‘counter-revolution’ and the work of imperialism. It was in fact the only revolutionary path for those workers. In order to take their place beside the inter- national working class in the struggle to defeat imperialism, they were and are forced to take the step of political revolution against their bureaucratic rulers. These bureaucrats, part of the international apparatus of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Kremlin, play the counter-revolutionary role of accommodating to the imperialists and separating the work- ers of Russia and Eastern Europe from the class struggle against imperialism in the rest of the world. This accommodation to imperialism is in fact a growing and enormous danger to the conquests of the October Revolution and its extension by military-bureaucratic means into Eastern Europe after World War I!. When the Hungarian and Polish workers today con- tinue their struggle against the bureaucracy, they are the best detenders of these gains, just as they were in 1956. The workers’ councils of 1956 were thus part of the very same struggle as that of the Vietnamese workers and peasants today, as that of workers in the advanced capitalist countries against their own ruling classes as the most effective blow they can _ strike against the imperialist butchery in Vietnam. The international class struggie is one; the programme of the Fourth International is the revolutionary basis for effectively uniting all these struggles under Marxist leadership for the defeat of world capitalism. This is why only the Fourth International, through the International Committee, can mobilise at the same time the most effective forces against the imperialist war in Vietnam and for the defence of the Hungarian and Polish Octobers. This unified programme was dramatically expressed in the demonstration at Liége, Belgium on October 15th, 1966. There the revolutionary youth of the British Young Socialists and French youth paper ‘Révoltes’ participated in an international youth demon- stration against the imperialist war in Vietnam and against the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Their participation was based on the essential nature of a struggle against the bourgeoisie in their own coun- tries as the key to a struggle against imperialist war. There is no peace without new revolutions, as Lenin said. But the preparation for such struggles for power requires in our epoch an implacable fight against the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy. For this reason the Trotskyist youth of Britain and France carried the banner, ‘Long Live the Hungarian Revolution

[p005] 162 of 1956!’, and defended it against all those Stalinists, fellow-travellers and pacifists who left the demonstration or threatened to do so, once an attempt to call in the police had been exposed. This expression of the radicalisation and political development of working-class youth represents the living forces which make the programme of the Fourth International at its founding conference in 1938 a document of burning actuality. As the Manifesto of the 1966 Conference of the International Com- mittee makes clear, the crisis of the capitalist system forces the imperialists to threaten every historical gain made by the working class, from the property relations established by the October Revolution to the basic trade union organisations of the old capitalist countries. But these attacks, in Vietnam as well as in Western Europe, are the result of crisis, and not of the strength and confidence of the ruling class in any sense. The imperialists have to engage the mighty forces of the working class in struggle. Wherever they turn to resolve their crisis, it is this great force which stands against them. Workers are drawn into struggles which are immedi- ately political in character: the question of power is raised at every turn by the attempt of the capitalists to saddle the working class with the crisis. This means that a battle for political leadership is fought out in front of the workers in struggle. It is therefore in a changed international context that the workers of the USSR and Eastern Europe take up their struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy today. Through intervention in this new stage of the world class struggle, the forces of the International Committee of the Fourth International hold out an entirely new prospect for the struggles in such countries as Hungary. When the Young Socialists and the Socialist Labour League in Britain fight against the Labour Government and _ its FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, NOVEMBER 1966 attempts to disicipline the working class to capitalism, they are building the force which can really support the revolutionary war in Vietnam. At the same time, they strengthen the only force which is really capable of building on the experience of the Hungarian struggle against Stalinism, the Fourth Inter- national, whose programme unites all these struggles. When the French Trotskyists of the Organ- isation Communiste Internationaliste, and the revolutionary youth of the paper Révoltes, fight against de Gaulle, and against the ‘socialists’ and and Stalinists who welcome his ‘peace initiatives’ on Vietnam, they too are basing themselves on the programme of Bolshevism: the enemy is at home, in our own country, the class enemy. Here then is the real proletarian inter- nationalism. Against all the false ‘friends’ of the Hungarian Revolution, from open anti- communists to revisionists like the Pabloites who cover up for the bureaucracy, the task is to build an international revolutionary leader- ship which can unite the Hungarian workers in their political revolution against bureau- cracy with the struggles of workers in the imperialists countries against the capitalist state. Against all those who call for ‘peace’ in Vietnam, from de Gaulle to the Stalinists of all varieties, the task is to strike blows against the imperialists who conduct the Vietnam war, body-blows from the working class of the advanced capitalist countries, above all the USA, France and Britain. The working class can only be mobilised for such battles behind a Trotskyist leader- ship which fights against the opportunists and Stalinists at every turn, to resolve the crisis of working-class leadership. Here lie the lessons of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, of the Vietnam war of 1966, of the October Revolution of 1917, and of the long struggle of Trotsky to build the Fourth Inter- national on the foundations of Bolshevism.

[p006] An Evaluation 0 John Maynard Keynes by G. Pilling ‘To understand my_ state of mind, however, you have to know that (believe) myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolu- tionise —not, suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years—the way the world thinks about economic problems. When my new theory has been duly assimilated and mixed with politics and feelings and passions, cant predict what the final upshot will be !n its effect on action and affairs. But there will be a great change and, in particular, the Ricardian foundations of Marxism will be knocked away.'! 163 THERE IS LITTLE doubt that the work of John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) has had the greatest impact upon both orthodox economic theory and policy in this century. No development of Marxist political economy is possible without a thorough and systematic critique of his contribution to the development of economics and to bourgeois thought in general. Although many professional economists might dissent on points of detail and emphasis from his conclusions and even from his method, Keynes’ theoretical system is the ‘starting point’ for contemporary discussion. Or as one recent writer has put it ‘modern economics is neo-Keynesian economics. It is the purpose of this paper to begin a treatment of Keynes’ work; for this purpose concentration will be placed upon his own writings and particularly upon his most mature statement, the General Theory of Employ- ment, Interest and Money.3 Some reference will be made to post-Keynesian developments, but these will in the main be left for treatment at a later date. It is especially necessary that Marxists take up the challenge and the problems posed by Keynes. It is widely assumed that as a result of his work the problems of instability and crisis which were formerly a normal feature of capitalism are now largely a thing of the past. As such it is widely believed that Keynes deals adequately with the Marxian and socialist critique of capitalism. It is also important that Marxists take up a struggle against Keynesian theories because, in the opinion of the present writer at least, much of the dis- cussion about Keynes from those claiming to be Marxists has been crude and inadequate. Paul Sweezy, by no means the worst example of this type, has suggested that while the Keynesian system is constructed in logically consistent terms it is ‘utopian’ in the sense that Keynes’ theoretical system does not correspond to the situation in the real (capitalist) world: that it is impossible to apply his remedies for the ills of capitalism. Thus Sweezy’s discussion of Keynes is largely con- cerned with the role of the state as an economic instrument; with the possibilities for income re- distribution and the ‘socialisation of investment’ under capitalism. Although many of the points 1. John Maynard Keynes, letter to George Bernard Shaw, Jan. Ist. 1935. Quoted in R. F. Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes, London 1951, page 462. 2. Jan Pen, Modern Economics, London, 1965, page 10. 3. J. M. Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest & Money, London, 1936. (Hereafter General Theory.)

[p007] 164 which he makes are formally correct they are discussed largely in isolation from the theoretical system and method of Keynes, which is assumed to be ‘logically consistent’. It is interesting that this same writer, at the time of Keynes’ death, in evaluating his contribution to the development of economic theory, makes large concessions to him.4 Other writers, more directly under the im- pact of Stalinism, have had no consistently worked-out attitude to Keynes: their position has varied in direct relation with the position of the Soviet bureaucracy.> It is necessary for Marxists to tackle Keynes from a methodological point of view and to place him correctly in the evolution of bourgeois economic theory. Secondly, his work must be critically examined from the point of view of the light which it throws on the develop- ment of the capitalist system itself: Marxists must deal with the ‘New Economics’ as an ideological reflection of the development of capitalism itself. It is my intention here to tackle both of these problems, the first one in more detail than the second, . Keynes’ claim to a place in the leading ranks of orthodox economics lies in the fact that he was amongst the first, during the 1930s, to attempt to show, in a worked-out theoretical form, why capi- talism was not an automatically self-regulating system of production which guaranteed the maxi- mum utilisation of productive resources. That capitalism was such a harmonious system had been one of the implicit assumptions throughout most of the nineteenth century—from the final triumph of the Ricardian economics over those of Malthus. An economy based upon private ownership in the means of production, it was assumed, did promote just such a full utilisation of economic resources. This implicit assumption was perhaps most crudely seen in ‘Say’s Law of Markets’ which in the now famous phrase asserted that ‘suovly always creates its own demand’ All the leading representatives of orthodoxy—Ricardo, Mill, Tevons, Marshall, and Pigou—followed in this tradition. Marx and his followers, along with a few other isolated writers, stood alone in re- jecting this orthodoxy.’ The Great Denression of the 1920s and ’30s threw such orthodoxy into crisis. Keynes’ role was to provide the most coherent and consistent attempt to resolve this theoretical crisis by in- corporating into the body of economic theory new concevts and categories which would enable economics to exnlain this crisis and also advance practical remedies for its solution. The import of Keynes’ achievements and the place of his FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, NOVEMBER 1966 General Theory as a classic of economics depend upon whether one accepts that his theoretical system did constitute a ‘revolution’ in the methodology of economics. That this is the case is now almost universally accepted, by pro- and anti-Keynesians, including many Marxists. Keynes himself felt that his work involved a sharp, even painful, break from the grip of ortho- doxy. His treatment of both his predecessors and his contemporaries (notably A. C. Pigou, at that time Professor of Political Economy in Cambridge) is often unsympathetic and disparaging in tone. He writes in the General Theory: ‘The composition of this book has been for the author a long struggle of escape, and so must the reading of it be for most readers if the author’s assault upon them is to be successful, a struggle of escape from the natural modes of thought and expression. The ideas which are here expressed so laboriously are extremely simple and should be obvious. The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas but in escaping from the old ones which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into the corner of our minds.’8 Did Keynes in fact escape from these ‘natural modes of thought and expression’? To answer this crucial question in fact means to examine Keynes’ own views on the development of the ‘old ideas’ and his relationship to them. We shall suggest that his understanding of these historical developments was formal and superficial and therefore provides an inadequate basis on which to evaluate his con- tribution to economic thought in this century. 4. ‘Generally speaking their logical consistency can- not be challenged, either on their own ground or on the basis of the Marxian analysis of the reproduction process. The critique of Keynesian theories of liberal capitalist reform starts, therefore, not from their economic logic but rather from their faulty (usually implicit) assumptions about the relationship, or perhaps one should say lack of relationship, between economics and political action.’ P.M. Sweezy Theory of Capitalist Development, London, 1942, page 348. Also the same author’s Present as History, New York, 1953 and ‘John Maynard Keynes’ Science and Society, Fall 1946, Vol. X, reprinted in S. E. Harris (editor) The New Economics, New York, 1947. >. An example of this would be John Eaton’s popular Political Economy, the various editions of which, in their changing treatment of Keynes, have been directly influenced by immediate political considera- tions. 6. Jean Baptiste Say (1767-1832) after whom this . ‘law’ is known. 7. Among the non-Marxists the most notable were the ‘under-consumptionists’ including in England J. A. Hobson. 8. Preface to General Theory.